331–340 of 372 posts
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Agreed - Around here @100K is higher than most. It all depends on your geography. I would live like a king with 300K!
I wouldn't... I would live like a miser for 2-3 years and retire to do whatever I wanted. Maybe 4 if I felt like travelling the world for a decade. :)
I'm curious to hear the answer to these questions from a woman's perspective. I met a few lady engineers through IEEE involvement in university who were further along in their careers, but I haven't met very many other lady devs over the age of 35.
I am a 40 year old female whose been coding since I was 23. College degree but not in comp sci. Completely self taught. I have never felt more at the top of my game as I do right now! In my "short" time as a developer I've worked for startups, fortune 500s and did 7 years at Amazon. I've had a large amount of experience on both coasts. So far I've had zero problems being recruited. I tend to mark that up to the prese…
I would argue that most developers are underpaid relative to their productivity benefit. The Silicon Valley wage theft pact had an impact across the entire industry as it set a lower ceiling on wages which few employers chose to beat. It still shocks me how few star programmers earn as much as pro baseball players (without taking on the risk of startup options).
Hell, I'm near my late 30s and I've never made over 28k (and the one time I did it lasted one year). Right now I'm a permatemp contractor (no benefits) but I like the job because I get to do design work a lot. Granted I'm not a "hacker" and more of a mediocre dev. I've read questions on "older developers" for years (back on slashdot and digg), so I've always known it was going to come sooner or later. I don't know ho…
Its a shame that after 10 years my salary seems to have peaked, just when I feel I am starting to get good. Problem is no one seems to reward you for being good. They are happy when something works (or appears to). They seem to have no concern that the code will be buggy and unreliable and require constant tweaking. Get something out like that in a week, rather than something solid that takes twice as long.
I'm 60+. I've been coding my whole career and I'm still coding. Never hit a plateau in pay, but nonetheless, I've found the best way to ratchet up is to change jobs which has been sad, but true - I've left some pretty decent jobs because somebody else was willing to pay more. This has been true in every decade of my career. There's been a constant push towards management that I've always resisted. People I've known w…
Great answer! Just for curiosity, detracting from the original topic, what was your favorite language to code professionally?
I'd like to discuss an issue that you might not have thought about: What's going to happen if you lose your job?
Employment in the 50s can be problematic. If somebody is skilled and employed, and has a high-level title or is a specialist or has useful connections, they should be able to obtain a new position.
Otherwise, they might go from well-off to homeless. It happens. I'm 55, my resume has been called pretty good, and I was worth $1M a decade ago. I'm a transient now. I've got some medical issues, no medical care, and no dentists. Potential jobs are primarily unskilled physical labor, which I'm not able to do.
I'll be taking a shot at tutoring. However, I don't expect that to provide more than gas money. The head of an admin assistant firm said that I can't be a secretary unless I already am one. Two people considered sending me to care for elderly relatives, but we didn't proceed. My title at one of those positions was going to be "poop scooper".
Don't let this happen to you.
For what it's worth, here's my advice:
1. Don't fall off of the employment ladder.
2. Become a specialist. Try to remain broad enough, though, that you don't become obsolete.
3. Build a network of people. Make it a large one.
4. Diversify your investments.
5. While you're employed, don't let medical issues, even minor ones, go untreated for long. If you lose your job and your assets, you'll lose medical care too and the issues may become serious.
6. Be kind to people. But don't be a fool. Most people that you help are not going to return the favor.
Regarding specialists, I did recruiting for a while in 2011 and I can confirm that the filters are heavily weighted against generalists.
I've spent about 35 years myself as a generalist. My jobs called for it. The place where I spent most of my career took any project that came along, code of any type. At a dot-com that followed, after the money ran out, I handled all of the technical roles; IT, websites, development, support, documentation, etc. I was able to do a bit of everything.
Later on, none of this made a difference. There are no job listings that say "a bit of everything".
After the dot-com shut down, 2003, I made a million dollars in the stock market. Lost most of it afterwards and reentered the job market. Learned that middle-age generalists were not in high demand.
In my case, there were other factors that won't apply to you. It's a story for another time. But if you're a generalist who falls off of the ladder in middle age, you can expect things like this:
"With a resume like that, why isn't he a CTO? Why doesn't he even have a job?"
You'll be asked questions about algorithms that you haven't thought about for 30 years. Or you'll go through coding tests under adverse conditions that don't allow you to show what you can do.
Plan ahead. Understand that the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.
My own resume is located at:
http://oldcoder.org/general/misc/Kiraly_Resume.pdf
Regards, Robert (the Old Coder)
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Sounds like what I want to be doing. I'm curious if you have additional insight on taking on this path, I want to keep all of my options open and instead of say just pursue embedded/real-time systems and find out that the field is too narrow. What do you recommend to study as opposed to CRUD web-apps, C/C++, ML, data analysis with Python/R or learn more domain specific knowledge such as Bioinformatics or graphics or…
I am a database developer in a sequencing center. I would not recommend bioinformatics if you have any passion for good quality code. There are some decent bioinformaticians out there, but most of them write crap 100 line scripts, and have very little desire to learn more than the basics. I am getting increasingly frustrated, as I can see I am clearly writing significantly smarter software then these people (most of…
I don't really mind the management slights as it's an occupational hazard of a programmer. What bothered me about academic research was how the doors were shut for you if you did not pursue the traditional PhD/post-doc path of life sciences research. Also that pure Bioinformaticians even with academic pedigree was considered lower in the pecking order in comparison to "wet-lab" folks.
As crazy as it sounds, I really miss the days of writing Perl scripts (Python probably now); running BLAST and plotting Information Theory graphs. How do you like your current gig and what do you recommend for someone who is looking to jump back into it?
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">As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau." There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K: Housing costs and College Tuition. At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric, your home mortgage would be capped around ~$900k, vs the $1.3-1.5MM range of current trading prices. Which is not terrible if you lock something in. However, once you are at 4x paying for schools becomes a far greater challenge. Yo…
Just throwing this out there: if there's a problem with developer salaries being capped at $300K, think of how hard it is for all the families who are making the U.S. median household income of $53K/year, or hell, the Santa Clara County median income of $45K/year. I understand that everybody wants more money - hell, I want more money too. But a lot of that is because everybody wants to be in the top 1% of nice neighb…
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Sounds great, can you share what ]helped you become a top earner?
That a serious question or are you making a point? It's often hard to tell on the Internet... Edit: Oh, I see - you've confused me with the person way up-thread with the $300K income, I'm not the same poster as he. I don't like to reveal my income on the Internet, but I'd describe it as "enough", so, to answer your question: 1.) Be alert to pure, dumb luck when it happens, and willing to take advantage of it - includ…
With one caveat:
>Always hone your skills so that when an opportunity arises, you can pounce.
My strategy has been to follow my passions, which include digging into various technologies that interest me. I don't do it "so that" I can be relevant. I do it because it's fun.
It just happens that, when you get good enough at enough things, you'll find that at least some of those skills are in demand. I know a lot about so many programming topics that one coworker just accused me of having "an encyclopedic understanding of just about every topic."
A lot of people have their curiosity tortured out of them by their experiences in school. Anyone reading HN likely is at least on the road to lifelong learning, so anyone reading this is likely on a path that could result in a strong salary. To those who complain that reading about every latest new technology is boring, I say: Find your childlike curiosity and reclaim it.
I'm about to turn 53. I spend most of my day coaching younger programmers at Facebook (because they're almost all younger). We pair program and talk. I work on speculative projects, some consumer-oriented, some programming tools and some infrastructure. I also research software design and the diffusion of innovation. I took a 10 year excursion into being a guru, but I'm technical now and intend to stay that way. I lo…
I'm 38 -- your notes on memory are interesting. I use Anki spaced-repetition software to retain less-often-used technical minutiae. I'm also transitioning to using it to integrate new knowledge. Clip to Evernote. Create flash-cards in Anki, and practice on my commute.
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I am a database developer in a sequencing center. I would not recommend bioinformatics if you have any passion for good quality code. There are some decent bioinformaticians out there, but most of them write crap 100 line scripts, and have very little desire to learn more than the basics. I am getting increasingly frustrated, as I can see I am clearly writing significantly smarter software then these people (most of…
hi collyw, thanks for your message. I'm indeed really interested in Bioinformatics. I've had experiences in undergrad similar to what you described (e.g., a folder with 50 Perl scripts that does a variation of the same thing). I don't really mind the management slights as it's an occupational hazard of a programmer. What bothered me about academic research was how the doors were shut for you if you did not pursue the…
Apparently most labs have a shortage of bioinformaticians (at least that's what I hear here in Europe).
Yes, having a PhD will be helpful if you are looking towards a more research oriented side of things. If not you are more likely to be more of a technician, and your work will be a bit more production like.
My advice would just be to look at institutes that you would be interested in working at - their job pages. I am sure you could start with more production style things and move into a more research oriented role.
Here is the jobs page for science park I work in in Barcelona (pay doesn't sound much compared to the US). Not much up there just now, but I know we are hiring more people soon.